Law study helped with the Acutonics training as well. “I could gobble up a wide-ranging curriculum of considerable depth, aspects of which could be in themselves life-long studies,” says Joanie. “I had the confidence I needed to just dive in.”
Joanie’s first encounter with Acutonics was at a sound healing conference and was at a time when she was preparing for the New York State Bar exam. “Donna and Ellen were there, and lots of Bay Area practitioners too, and I found I couldn’t stay away from their booth,” recalls Joanie. It was a large conference with many exhibitors and presentations, with practically everyone who was anyone in sound healing at the time, which was perfect for someone who was just beginning to explore sound healing. “In the Acutonics booth, they had a Chiron gong hanging there and something in that gong just kept calling to me—I could feel it in my chest. It was a pretty chaotic environment in the exhibitor hall, and Chiron would recalibrate me every time I listened to it.”
She was born and raised in Southern California, with three sisters. “I characterize my parents as being like opposite sides of the Grand Canyon,” says Joanie. “My dad was physical, a mechanical engineer, sporty, very social—but a frustrated artist, really, he became a sculptor once he retired. My mother was more of an introvert and seemed so spiritual and ethereal she was hardly there.”
Joanie identified with both, but not in an easy way. “I would go from that teenage fascination with all things spiritual, to then thinking it is all rubbish and a construct,” she says. “I could see the way the world worked, but I could feel something else, so the polarity was really in me.”
Her mother was her touchstone; she was interested in much of the 1970s research, quietly exposing anyone who would listen to color therapy, numerology, Alan Watts on radio station KPFK and the like. Years after her mother had died, Joanie found an early sound healing tape by Steve Halpern in her mother’s things. “What do you know, apples don’t fall far from the trees!”
After completing her Acutonics core curriculum, Joanie began teacher training in 2009. She is now licensed to teach the entire curriculum. She also took time to gain additional experience and confidence as both a practitioner and teacher of Acutonics. She completed her training to become a Certified Acutonics® Practitioner in 2010 and took additional courses in acupuncture before she began to teach. For the past three years she has been studying the work of Ruediger Dahlke, particularly psychosomatic medicine and the archetypes.“So much to learn, so little time,” muses Joanie. “Everything increases our understanding.”
“Acutonics made a healer out of me,” she continues, reflecting on her path. “It has the right balance of the scientific rigor and the esoteric. It’s the perfect mix of what my mom gave me and what my dad gave me. There was that split in me growing up. Now they’ve been brought together through this work. And it is also how I’ve come to be a practitioner.”
Recently in New Mexico to visit the Mothership for a few weeks, Joanie has been collaborating with Donna and Ellen on a new art installation, and they’d come down to Santa Fe on a search for metalworking tools and materials. Joanie began metalworking about six years ago and has been studying the making of singing bowls with Dutch bowl master Ton Akkermans and his partner Carolina Schomper. They teach ancient coppersmithing techniques and work with intention, so that each bowl made is imbued with the energy of the intention. Many bowls, tubular bells, gongs, and chimes later, she now has a forge and workshop at home.
Joanie, Donna and Ellen have been on many adventures together, including a trip several years back when they drove across northern Europe on a quest to get as many hand-crafted planetary gongs as would fit in a Land Rover. Nine, as it turned out (along with the three of them and their bags as well).
Aside from her teaching and clinical practice, Joanie also enjoys working with horses. She trained in Equine Acutonics with Patty Warren, a longtime Acutonics teacher and practitioner who runs the Equine School of Light and Sound. The first horse Joanie treated was Rocky, an ailing equine that lived just down the road from the Mothership. Almost as soon as she worked on Rocky, using the tuning forks, he began to improve. “My daughters were with me at the Mothership and we all worked on Rocky together, and they were really impressed with how quickly change could be instigated with the tuning forks,” remembers Joanie. “We were hooked.”
Joanie loves horses and the people who care for them—and their willingness to care for their animals. “Horse people are realistic and practical, though they may be very conservative in their lives and wouldn’t necessarily try Acutonics for themselves,” says Joanie, who frequently works on polo ponies back in England. “They’ll try whatever it takes for their horses.”
Another case that pulled her in was Sorpressa, a polo pony with facial palsy who couldn’t blink her eye, so there was a danger that the eye might be lost without intensive intervention. “The tuning forks worked their magic and she was about 75 percent better in just a few days,” says Joanie. “The remainder took longer to heal but she was out of the danger zone within a short period of time.”
Future plans include a series of Self-Care workshops incorporating the tuning forks with other methods of self-care. “I want to explore that terrain of taking responsibility for our own health and well-being,” says Joanie. The idea is to send people home with a few simple techniques that they can do daily, and to create a community that can support and encourage its members in this endeavor. “Taking responsibility for ourselves is a subversive act!”
It may have taken her awhile to get going with the teaching, and reaching out, but now Acutonics is being very well received in the UK and in Europe. People are very receptive and enthusiastic. They’ll often say things to Joanie like, “I’ve waited 20 years for this!”
She recently exhibited at the British Acupuncture Council Conference. “It was a very friendly and open crowd, at least the ones who came to our table,” says Joanie. And they were so happy we were there. Many said they had been to gong baths and had some sense of the power of using sound and were intrigued to see how they could incorporate it directly into their practices.
“What I really want,” she adds, “is to make myself obsolete. I want to train so many great practitioners that everyone in Europe can have reasonable access to Acutonics and no one need travel to me. I’m just getting the ball rolling, and that is so much fun.”
Joanie is offering Acutonics Level I October 22-25 and Acutonics Level II October 26-29 in Karsko, Poland, near Szceczin. Classes will be taught in English with Polish translation (by Acutonics Level III Student Practitioner Anna Peciak.) Please contact Lukasz Mazurek for information or to register Lukasz@nepalshop.pl.
Join Joanie for a Self-Care workshop: Acutonics Ohmworks® yoga and massage in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK December 2nd from 10-5. She will also offer Acutonics Level I December 7-9 and Level II December 10-12 in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. For more information contact Joanie Solaini at joanie@singingspheres.com or phone +44 (0)7867 781479.